Jack Higgins

Jack Higgins0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a download from the Desert Island Disc's archive. This edition may be slightly different from what was actually broadcast, but it is the only version we have. It comes from the British Library's radio collection.

Jack Higgins0:14

The recording didn't contain the guests' eight music choices, so we've rebuilt the original show by using discs from the B B C Gramophone library. For Wright's reasons we've had to shorten the music.

Jack Higgins0:25

Full details can be found on the Castaways page on the Desert Island Disc's website.

Jack Higgins0:30

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty one.

Jack Higgins0:33

And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:52

This week, our castaway is the thriller writer Jack Higgins. Jack, could you endure isolation for a long time?

Presenter0:59

Oh yes. You know, people are uh are either extrovert or introvert. I don't know that I'm all that introverted, but I've always been a bit of a loner. I mean, when I was a youngster

Presenter1:08

It was long country walks in the rain and that kind of thing, and my own thinking. So there's no question about it. Um I think I could endure isolation.

Presenter1:18

How much does music mean in your life? We give you this meagre alliance of eight discs.

Presenter1:23

Yes, it is a meagre allowance, but after all, uh when casts away one can only seize upon a few available uh stocks of good things. Music?

Presenter1:32

It's tremendously important to me. Do you allow any part of your work to a musical background?

Jack Higgins1:34

Do you do it?

Presenter1:37

Oh yes, frequently. Frequently. I mean play tapes all the time. I'm very Catholic in my tastes. I like good commercial pop music as well as classical music. If there's one thing I'm particularly fond of

Presenter1:56

It's good piano music. Now by that

Presenter2:01

It could be George Shearing, Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck.

Presenter2:05

Or

Presenter2:06

Ash Canazzi, Raff La Roscoe playing a piano concerto, but good piano music, I love more than any other thing. What are we starting with? Well, I've chosen one of the great

Presenter2:17

Standards of all time, Laura, which was originally background music to a very famous film of that name. I should point out that I've decided to choose records which mean something to me, probably at a particular time in my life. And Laura takes me back to my teenage. Towards the end of the war, I was an army cadet in a training camp just before the end of the war on the Yorkshire cliffs. And I went into town one night and found I'd no money. And I walked back all the way along the beach, which was marked mined. But in fact, there were no mines. They told us it was safe. When I got back to the camp, I heard they were showing a film in a Nissan hut. And I thought it was a training film, but as I had nothing else to do, I went into the hut, and to my astonishment, they were showing this film Laura, and the music.

Presenter3:05

Absolutely.

Presenter3:06

enraptured me at the time and it always brings back that period in one's life, my particular teenage at the end of the war.

Speaker 34:05

Dora Bye.

Presenter4:07

Oscar Peterson.

Presenter4:08

You're from Northern Ireland, is that right? Well, originally, yes, and then um

Presenter4:13

When my mother remarried them, I moved over to.

Presenter4:17

Yorkshire to Leeds and lived there for many years on and off to the extent that, in fact, many people.

Jack Higgins4:19

Yeah.

Presenter4:24

Have always uh thought me to be a Leeds man. So you went to school in Leeds? Were you fond of books?

Presenter4:30

Did you read a lot? Extraordinarily fond of books. I discovered public libraries very, very early in life.

Presenter4:38

To the extent that although um

Presenter4:41

I was still in my fifteenth year when I left school.

Presenter4:46

I had read um Tolstoy and Chekhov and and uh Stendahl and Ernest Hemingway and I'd discovered Scott Fitzgerald and so on.

Presenter4:56

What was your first job at the age of what fourteen?

Presenter5:03

Leeds cleansing department. I was a sort of junior clerk, messenger boy, by the canal. That was the best thing that came along. That was the best thing that came along. Yes, the the

Jack Higgins5:07

That would be a good thing.

Jack Higgins5:08

That was the

Presenter5:12

Jobs were relatively scarce, it was the end of the war and there was a period of great adjustment and for what it's worth um you just didn't have the choice. I realised very quickly that it was um a dull, boring, totally dead-end job and that there could never be a future in it for anyone, so it was a question of marking time because army service was coming along anyway.

Jack Higgins5:34

Right.

Speaker 35:34

Yeah.

Presenter5:35

Let's have your second record before we start talking about your Army career.

Presenter5:40

Well, I'm very fond of big bands. One of the reasons being that my stepfather, Cliff Thompson, was a band leader in the thirties, and in fact used to broadcast from Belfast on the BBC Northern Ireland service. So I always loved big bands. And I've chosen that famous crooner of the 30s, Al Boley. And he's singing a track here with Lou Stone in his band called Moonlight on the Highway, which isn't one of his best known songs, but I find it magical, and it's a special association for me because I used it

Presenter6:15

In a book called The Savage Day, which was the first Jack Higgins book to get into the best-seller lists, and

Presenter6:22

I mentioned in the book a character who was very fond of Al Boli to the extent that he carried a cassette recorder around and played Al Boli all the time. And the book became enormously successful, and the result was that I decided, as a good luck charm, that in future, in every book I wrote, I would mention Al Boli. There would be Al Boli singing a song in the background.

Presenter6:44

Very touchingly, only last year I had a a letter right out of the blue from Johannesburg from Mishbole, Al Boley's brother, who is still alive, saying that he'd discovered this, that there was always Al Boley in a Jack Higgins book, and how he always looked forward to a new one to read it, waiting to see where his brother would be mentioned.

Speaker 47:02

Moonlight on the highway Moonlight on the plain

Speaker 47:11

Turn your light on my way through memory lane

Speaker 47:19

Moonlight on the highway, guide me while I roam.

Speaker 47:28

Shine upon each by way

Jack Higgins7:30

Uh

Speaker 47:32

Like leaves me to hold

Speaker 47:36

A place where roses remember

Speaker 47:42

And folks forget me not whatever.

Speaker 47:48

It's worth dreaming on

Presenter7:53

A 1938 recording by Al Bowley and Lou Stone in his orchestra. So you left the cleansing department at Leeds and went into the army, the guards. Yes, the blues, the Royal Horse Guards, much to my surprise. I mean, I didn't volunteer or anything. I was in an infantry regiment first for training. And after that initial training, I was simply told that I was being transferred to the Household Cavalry Training Regiment at Windsor. And quite an experience it proved to be, I can tell you. Where did you serve?

Presenter8:25

Well, in England and a brief time at Knightsbridge Barracks in London, and then in various places in Germany it was a very interesting time to be doing it because

Presenter8:34

1947 into 1948, 1949 was the Cold War. And we were in Berlin during the airlift, which for those who too young to remember that was when the Russians cut the city off completely. And you never went to bed without

Jack Higgins8:42

Yeah.

Presenter8:50

Thinking that you would probably wake up to find the Russian army in total occupation. So it was a very interesting time, very strange, because, of course, Germany was still suffering badly from the effects of the war. People walked around wearing old military uniforms, and there were brick fields everywhere, and this kind of thing. And we were involved a lot with security work on the East German border because they didn't have walls and things in those days. And again, a lot of the things that happened then come into my books later on. Did you consider an army career?

Presenter9:26

Well, the interesting thing is that I had the chance of a commission, but the commission was going to be in some sort of other unit, you see, either an infantry regiment, and then there was a chance of one in the Service Corps at the time. And you see, if you're in an elite regiment and, you know, being frank about it, as an old horse guard, there's nothing more elite than the Royal Horse Guards, or the Blues and the Royals, as they're called now. The idea of going into anything else very much smacks of a step down.

Presenter9:59

To what extent had the army changed your ideas in two or three years?

Presenter10:04

tremendously. I'd been involved in some physical things, dangerous incidents and so on. So I came out at the other end, very fit, very tough, knowing certain capabilities. And you know what the tragedy was?

Presenter10:21

I had left a sort of local corporation office the highways department it was almost three years before.

Presenter10:29

cycling up the hill on my way home to join the army, and saying to myself,

Presenter10:33

Well, that's that. I'll never have to go back to that sort of thing again. And three years later, I was back doing exactly the same thing, and people treated me as if I was still the lad who'd gone away. So, what did you do about it? Well, I did a certain amount of education in my spare time and in the evenings, and in fact, managed to come up to quite a respectable level of uh education. I had matriculation certificates and things like that. And I finally walked out of the uh the job at the Highways Department, and I then moved into a series of um

Presenter11:04

Odd jobs. I remember I worked for Bertrand Mills Circus as a tenth hand for a while, which was quite an experience, I can tell you. Probably the hardest job I think I'd ever done in my life. And then I was a surveyor in the burglary department of an insurance company. That meant that one used to go out when people wanted burglary insurance and you surveyed the buildings and things like that. And then I tried being a representative, you know, shop to shop. In my case, selling tobacco. Now, the interesting thing about that was it took me back to Northern Ireland for a while because the firm I was employed with was

Presenter11:40

In those days, Murray's tobacco factory, which was situated in Belfast. So I had to go back to Belfast to learn about tobacco.

Presenter11:48

and then tried selling it very unsuccessfully, I must tell you.

Presenter11:53

You were a a tram conductor for a while, weren't you? Well, that came a little later.

Presenter11:57

When I decided that um life was just not working out, I always wrote in my spare time. I couldn't sell a word.

Presenter12:05

What, short stories? Yes, radio plays.

Presenter12:09

Even early television stuff, I couldn't get anywhere, and I also tried one or two novels, so I'd done an awful lot and not got anywhere. So looking back at it, it's a miracle I still kept trying.

Speaker 412:15

I'm not sure.

Presenter12:19

That um

Presenter12:20

I had reached an age of about twenty five or twenty six.

Presenter12:24

I wasn't engaged, I had no responsibilities.

Presenter12:28

And I realised my life was really going nowhere and the writing didn't seem to be getting anywhere. And in those days, there was a big shortage of teachers. And I discovered that I could get a grant to go to a teaching college. And that's what I did. And I went to Beckett Park and Carnegie, training colleges in Leeds. And I suddenly found myself, of course, living on a red brick campus in a hall of residence. It absolutely seemed marvellous. You see, after having left school comparatively early and had this kind of life and done all those jobs, here one was sitting in this amazing freedom of living in your own room in a hall of residence with all this time on your hands, you see. And that's when I really started writing seriously. And you worked your way to a degree.

Presenter13:12

Well, I did eventually, yes, I took a degree in sociology and social psychology as an external student. Why sociology and not literature?

Presenter13:21

Well, as my eldest daughter once said to me when she went to university and and and she chose archaeology instead of English, because she also, as you know, is a writer, she said, Well, I don't want anybody interfering with my style. Also, this period of going to college I must say was terribly important to me because I met my wife there as well.

Presenter13:40

Let's break off at this point for your third record, whatnot. Well, to bring that period back, I remember during this time at college staying one vacation when everybody else had gone home and I decided to spend the vacation writing a book. So I sat in the Hall of Residence on my own with the windows up, lovely spring weather, and somebody'd loan me some records. And it was the Dave Brubeck Quartet. And this particular track, Gone with the Wind, always brings that period in the late 50s when my whole life was changing back to me very, very vividly indeed.

Speaker 414:21

Yeah.

Speaker 414:24

Da da da da da da da da da da da.

Presenter15:00

Yeah.

Speaker 315:00

Dave Brubeck, Gone with the Wind.

Presenter15:02

You became a schoolmaster as the next step? Yes, I did indeed. What sort of school? Well, first of all, briefly, thank goodness, in the most downtown sort of blackboard jungle secondary modern school possible.

Presenter15:15

Really, um

Presenter15:18

every horror story you'd ever heard of, you know young fifteen year old tough boys running riot and pulling lights out of the ceiling and um intimidating schoolmasters and so on. I didn't go down at all well there.

Presenter15:33

The reason was that school teachers are like any other group of humanity. They're good, they're bad, and they're indifferent.

Presenter15:42

In a school like that I'm afraid what had tended to happen was

Presenter15:46

People had sort of drifted downwards in the system.

Presenter15:50

So the staff were not all that they might have been, and I'd simply been sent there to fill in before another appointment. And I'm afraid my Guards NCO training, um, I didn't take too kindly to

Presenter16:03

uh boys behaving in the way that these did and and they you know rousted uh other teachers and I wasn't prepared to put up with it and I'm afraid this caused a great deal of trouble so it was a good thing for everybody when the time came to an end and I moved on. Moved on where? Well I moved into one of the first large comprehensive schools in the country.

Presenter16:24

did in fact five or six years there, and from there I moved on to

Presenter16:29

Leeds College of Commerce, then Leeds Polytechnic. I did liberal studies and even did some some lecturing in creative writing. It was at a time when

Presenter16:39

There were one or two people involved uh at the Polytechnic who'd got some very um

Presenter16:44

far-sighted and liberal ideas, and we were given a chance to try all sorts of interesting projects. I don't know if it still happens, but it I'm afraid it faded away after a while. I then

Presenter16:56

I moved to a college in the West Riding, just outside Leeds, called James Graham College. I got an appointment there as a senior lecturer in education. This was a college which trained teachers for secondary schools, but it was a very interesting place in that all the students were mature people. The average age of the ladies was, I should say, about thirty-six, and a lot of the men were ex-policemen, ex-soldiers, all sorts of things. So they were a rather unusual kind of student to come to terms with. And you were still writing? I was writing like mad all the time. And in fact, I changed to Jack Higgins. Many people say to me, why do you do this? Well, Higgins was one of my mother's names. Yes, let's break this name thing down. You're not really Jack Higgins. Your real name is... Harry Patterson. Yes. And you'll also answer to. Well, I've been known as Martin Fallon and Hugh Marlowe and James Graham.

Speaker 417:42

You also

Presenter17:51

I presume all these writers were responsible for slightly different kinds of books as I wrote. To a certain degree. And also one of the problems was I was always rather prolific. And most publishers will only touch one book a year, you see. If I wrote two in a year

Speaker 317:51

Hi there.

Speaker 417:55

Uh

Jack Higgins17:55

Uh

Presenter18:04

And as I wanted the money for them, it meant I had to go to another publisher and he would ask for another name so that he could market the book, you see. This was the point.

Speaker 318:08

Yeah, and he

Speaker 318:12

Ross was

Speaker 318:14

Let's go.

Presenter18:16

At the time my life seemed to go two ways. Writing had been successful up to a point, and to give me a fairly good life I earned about the same amount of money a year as I made out of academic life.

Presenter18:28

And I had the choice of either continuing to write or carrying on with an academic career which would mean being a head of department, head of faculty, or something like that, where one was going to be so busy with administrative matters that any idea of having writing as a hobby was just not going to be possible.

Presenter18:48

And

Presenter18:49

I thought, well, why not? After all, I'm not all that successful as a writer. Why bother anymore? And an old friend, a teacher I was talking to one day, reminded me that many years ago I'd written a very literary book which had received wonderful reviews, but it sold about 1600 copies. And he said, you showed everybody that you could write with a capital W.

Jack Higgins19:05

Uh Yeah.

Presenter19:11

And he said, the trouble with thriller writers is you're all good on plots, but your characters are very cardboard. So he said, why don't you try and mix the two? You've shown you could write seriously and you can tell a good story, so mix the two and try and write a different kind of thriller. And so I did this that particular vacation and turned out the first Jack Higgins book, which was a book called East of Desolation. And it was immediately

Presenter19:34

Well received by the publishers and people who said, Look, we've got to start fresh because this is so much better than anything you've done before. We must treat it as a first novel. So they said, Sorry.

Presenter19:45

We're going to have to ask you for another name. And I came to the Higgins thing, as I say, because of a family association. How many books had you written before you had to make the great decision whether you were going to stay an academic or be a full time writer? Must have been thirty. As many as twenty eight or thirty more. You had, of course, responsibilities. You were married. You had

Jack Higgins19:58

As many as the

Jack Higgins20:01

Yeah.

Presenter20:04

Young children? Well, at the time we're talking about I'd three. Hmm.

Presenter20:09

And there always there was this responsibilities thing. When it came to the question of throwing everything up.

Presenter20:16

I had had

Presenter20:18

A small film offer a B picture. It was eventually made, in fact. It was called The Violent Enemy. It had Susan Hampshire in it, and Tom Bell, a very fine actor.

Presenter20:28

But it was a very small movie, in the days when they still made films like that in England.

Presenter20:33

And so I had the equivalent of two or three years' salary, and I had the chance of a two-book scheme in America. If I could produce them a second book, they would pay me $10,000 or something. So all in all, it looked as if it could give me the equivalent of my academic salary for, say, four or five years. And my wife said, why don't you give up and try and write this second book that the Americans want properly without having to worry about all your college work and university and things. And we went off to Cornwall to have a brief sort of half-term holiday out of season. And we were touring in the back country one day. You know, those little lost Cornish villages. And we came to the village of St Q.

Presenter21:15

And the children had gone ahead and gone into the church, and when I arrived there was the local rector talking to them. So he started to talk to me, showing me round the church, and at one point he said to me, May I ask what you do? and I told him and he then said You seem to have a bit of a problem. Can I help in any way?

Presenter21:34

And I said, Well, very strangely, I do have a problem, because I was very concerned about it, you see, because to throw everything up

Presenter21:40

A career, a pension, but as you say, the responsibilities was a big thing. And we sat down and discussed it. And he said to me, Well, I always say, do what Churchill used to say in the war. If you have a problem, get a sheet of paper, draw a line down the centre.

Presenter21:54

Put the pros on one side, the cons on the other, add them up, and whichever comes out top, that's what you do. And I went back to the cottage that night, put the pros and the cons down on paper, and it came out heavily that I should resign. And I wrote out my resignation letter and walked through the night in the rain to the village post box and posted it so I couldn't get it back. Now, the astonishing thing is that

Presenter22:18

Many years later,

Presenter22:20

when considerably better known, I was kidnapped one day in Leicester Square, and found myself on this is your life.

Presenter22:27

and they produced

Presenter22:29

the rector of Saint Q. And he said, I'd no idea that this man I spoke to at the back of the church that day would become a world famous writer and he said you know, the important thing about it is, not that he became a world famous writer,

Presenter22:43

We know now the effect my words had, but he said it's a lesson for all of us. You never know how much you can help another person and how importantly. You can do it with tremendous importance and yet never know what you did for someone.

Presenter22:57

Let's have record number four.

Presenter22:59

Well, cinema has always greatly influenced my life, even before I was lucky enough to see several of my books filmed.

Presenter23:08

I was always enchanted with it as a small boy in Belfast, living in very straitened circumstances, when you could get into the local flea pit on a Saturday for the proverbial jam jar.

Presenter23:18

And I have loved movies all my life.

Presenter23:20

So I've chosen one of the great evocative things for me, um that sequence from Casablanca, where we get that wonderful piano music, Dooley Wilson playing as time goes by.

Speaker 423:34

You must remember this. A kiss is still a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh. The fundamental things apply as time goes by.

Speaker 323:59

The soundtrack of Yeah.

Presenter24:01

Pasoplanca.

Presenter24:02

So you were a full time professional writer, did you say indeed? Well, I did for a while. What happened was the book I mentioned to you, which the Americans wanted, which I'd given everything up to write,

Presenter24:14

I actually did write, after a period of suddenly finding after forty to forty one years, that one had been working to a time schedule, getting up in the mornings and going to work at a fixed time, suddenly I was my own boss, a wonderful and yet terrifying feeling. And I ran around the local park with my dog for a fortnight.

Presenter24:32

Thinking I can't write. And then I sat down, I wrote a book called The Wrath of God, which just to confuse you even more, was published under the name of James Graham, my old. Now, funnily enough, this book, which was set in Mexico in the 1920s, and was a rather violent medieval story about a strange priest, the book was not terribly successful, but MGM bought it for considerable sum of money for those days and made a spectacularly good film. And a great, again, cinematic hero of mine, I couldn't believe it, played the lead, Robert Mitchum. And so suddenly life again was totally changed because the financial rewards which started coming in were such that one was beginning to look at things like the amount of income tax you were paying and so on. And really that had been a very quick change. Were you working regular hours each day? No, I never do. I agonise over a book and an idea. And then when I start in it, I work nights mainly. And I work like a dog for however long it takes to burn it out. Do you work in Longhand? I do. I used to type very much indeed. And then I got onto Longhand because I was having a writer's block once and it had gone on for a while. And then one evening I was in the kitchen, everybody gone to bed, and I suddenly got an idea for how to get through this writer's block.

Presenter26:00

And when I started typing on the kitchen table, the noise was so loud I thought I can't do this, I'll wake everybody up. So I started writing it. And it worked superbly. I wrote all night, so the following night I decided to do the same thing. And it's become a a habit. I do all my work that way. And then you type a fair copy, as it is. No, my wife does.

Speaker 426:07

And it

Jack Higgins26:07

Uh

Presenter26:18

I believe you started as a full-time writer about 1970, so it must have been about 1973 that you had a really first-class idea for a book. Yes. I'm talking about The Eagle Has Landed, of course. Yes, that's true. I'd had that idea, strangely enough, as a youngster, going back to those guards' days in Berlin and so on. I remember talking to some Russians once, and one of them who spoke English very well, which was a highly suspicious fact in those days for an NCO. We'd been having a discussion about commando operations in the war, and we'd mentioned Otto Skorciny, the famous German commando leader, and the man who kidnapped Mussolini and so on.

Presenter27:00

The Russians said, Yes, but the Germans were a lot better at it than people realize. And he said, You know, what about this Churchill affair? That came pretty close and so on. And I thought this was just a lot of nonsense because you heard about this kind of plot all the time. Your story, of course, was about a a German commando raid to kidnap. That's right, to kidnap a house in Norfolk, yes. And uh what really turned me onto it was when I

Jack Higgins27:16

Kidnapped Churchill from a house in Norfolk.

Presenter27:23

Went on holiday to Norfolk.

Presenter27:25

Talking to local people I discovered Churchill actually had visited the area in a kind of time scale.

Presenter27:31

indicated to me. Now that means I'm not claiming at all that the whole of that book is a non-fiction. Of course it isn't. There's a great deal of fact and there's a great deal of intelligent supposition. I mean for instance I created the character, very popular with many people because they I got hundreds of letters about her of Mrs. Gray who

Presenter27:51

for some reason was a German spy, although she seemed to be an English country lady. And I created her because there must have been someone very like her, because the facts that in the book I had Mrs. Gray discover and pass on to the German intelligence service were actually passed on during the war, so somebody like her must have done it, you see. How many languages has the Eagle Has Landed been published in North?

Presenter28:15

Well, I was going to say 42 and then I suddenly remembered that they were doing a Welsh translation some time ago at one of the Welsh universities because I believe they decided that it was time that the kind of books that people read, commercial books, should also be translated into Welsh. So that would make it 43. Oh, that's intelligent thinking. Yes. Let's have your fifth record. Well, going back to that film The Wrath of God with Robert Mitcham, simply because it obviously was again very important to me and that it was my first major film, the music in that film much impressed me. It was written by Lalo Schifrin, who by complete coincidence later also did the score for The Eagles Landed. But at one section in the film, they take a piece of music from an Argentinian modern mass called the Music Creola, and they played the Gloria, and it was very, very moving indeed. So I'd like to hear some of that music.

Speaker 429:09

El Saturday passa losombre

Speaker 429:16

Pasad losombes, quiam el señor, en la satura, de la ge, pasa losombes.

Speaker 329:39

The Gloria from Missa Criola, conducted by the composer Ariel Ramiret.

Presenter29:45

Uh

Presenter29:46

Now I know that your next record is part of the music from The Eagle Has Landed, and as we've been talking about that, let's go straight into it.

Presenter29:54

Yes, if I could just quickly say something about that. Although my latest book is Luciano's Luck, there will be a new Eagle is Landed coming along next year because we're putting in all the stuff which was cut out when the original version was brought out some years ago. Why was it cut? Well, I think it was cut at the time because when the book first came out, it was a period in British publishing when very long novels were not all that popular and Eagle was very long indeed. So the publishers decided they'd cut what seemed to them unnecessary information. Mostly it concerned what happened to all the characters after the operation was over. I received thousands of letters from people from all over the world asking me for the very information which the publishers had cut out. So we've put it back in. All this proves, by the way, is that six or seven years later, I still can't get away from The Eagle Has Landed. And so I think appropriately something from the film we should hear now.

Speaker 331:40

Lalo Shifrin and his

Presenter31:43

love theme from the film The Eagle Has Landed. Now of course The Eagle Has Landed was the jackpot. You elected to become a tax exile. You went off to Jersey. How's that worked out?

Presenter31:54

Very well indeed. In fact, I elected to go to Jersey.

Presenter31:58

Because it happens to be an absolutely delightful place to live, one of the last bastions of civilized life on earth. I'm talking now about a question of people and their attitudes to each other and this kind of thing. There is obviously an advantage for anyone living in Jersey, whether it's Jack Higgins or whether it's an English school teacher, because of course there's a set rate of income tax which is about 20%. 20p in the pound. Yes, oh there are great advantages. And of course you've had another enormous seller with storm warning.

Speaker 332:29

Yeah.

Presenter32:33

That's right, yes. Storm warning and then a really funny thing happened was I owed a book to an old friend in America and it couldn't be a Jack Higgins book, so I wrote

Presenter32:42

In fact, I wrote two books for him. One was the Valhalla Exchange, the other was To Catch a King, which dealt with Hitler's plot to kidnap the Duke of Windsor. And so we did them under my own name as Harry Patterson. And my goodness, they turned out to be enormous bestsellers. In fact, at one stage in the New York Times bestseller list, I had Storm Warning as Jack Higgins. And To Catch a King is Harry Patterson. And they rang me up from New York and interviewed me for an hour. The chap got special permission from the editor because he said it had only happened twice before that the same author had two novels in the top ten at the same time. And of course your daughter, Sarah Patterson, is a novelist and she began very early. Yes, she did indeed. When I was researching Eagle, we happened to come across an old deserted bomber station in Norfolk and she became fascinated by this and I told her it was a Lancaster bomber station and she became very engrossed with the library of war books in the cottage we were staying in.

Presenter33:37

And I remember the day she came in to me and said, I've just discovered the rear gunners and these Lancaster bombers were only about 18. And she could relate to this because at the time she was, I think, around about 15 or something like that. And she started writing this book, which was a love story told from the point of view of a 16-year-old girl, a Vickers daughter, an adult story.

Jack Higgins33:48

Yeah.

Presenter33:59

who meets a boy who's eighteen and a gifted musician, but who is a rear gunner in a Lancaster and who is very probably going to get killed almost any night. And this book had the most wonderful success. Do you know the extraordinary thing, it reprinted five times in its hardcover edition in Germany. Now, wouldn't you wonder what on earth did all those Germans see in a book about

Presenter34:24

A Lancaster, you know, rear gunner and so on. And yet, as I say, the book had an enormous success there.

Jack Higgins34:27

Yeah.

Presenter34:31

Let's have record number seven.

Presenter34:33

Well, record number seven is linked directly to my daughter in that she's also um a very gifted pianist.

Presenter34:43

And in her book, The Distant Summer, the boy was a gifted pianist and he was attempting to compose a piece he was calling the Norfolk Rhapsody. And the particular piano concerto which most reminded her of what she was trying to get down on paper was Rachmaninos Fourth Piano Concerto. Now, some years later, I wrote a Jack Higgins novel called Solo, which was enormously successful for me about a concert pianist who was also a terrorist. And my daughter gave me a lot of help with the technical side of the music for the book. All the pieces that Macaulay, this pianist terrorist in the book, used, were pieces that she was familiar with. So I got all that down very accurately. And the concerto we chose was Rachmaninos 4th. And in this case, I see we're having it played by Rafael Orosco. And I'm very pleased about that because, again, it's a link with Leeds for me, because of course he won the Leeds Piano Festival in 1966.

Speaker 435:44

Sure.

Speaker 336:47

The opening of the Rachmaninoff Fourth Piano Concerto, Raphael Arothko, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Speaker 336:55

Yeah.

Presenter36:55

Jack, how much of your army training would be useful on a desert island? Oh, an enormous amount. You could rig up a shelter with no. Oh, there's no question about that. Rig up a shelter.

Speaker 337:01

Could rig up a shelter with no

Presenter37:05

Very much remembering some of the old survival techniques taught, you know, how to construct crude tools and this sort of thing. A lot of that would be.

Speaker 337:13

A lot of that.

Speaker 337:14

Covered Island efficiency

Presenter37:16

Yes. Would you try to escape?

Presenter37:19

After a while, the reason being that um when I go to exotic places on holiday

Presenter37:25

This is one of the terrible things about success. People say, oh, you must go to the Bahamas and the West Indies and Florida all the time. But it reminds me of something Vincent Price once said, that he went all the way here to Hawaii because his wife persuaded him to go for a holiday. And on the second day, he suddenly sat up on the beach and thought, what on earth am I doing here? and got the plane back that afternoon. And I feel the same way. My feet start to burn in the hot sand and things. And I think my first instinct would be...

Presenter37:52

All right. It's been a good two days lying about here, and I've sort of got a an awning up, and I've worked out how to collect water. But really, what about getting off this place? More as a practical exercise than anything else.

Presenter38:05

Record number eight, your last record? Well, my last record's a very nostalgic one for me. It's Fred Astaire singing one of the great songs and the great lyrics of all time, A Foggy Day in London Town, which was from a pre-war movie he made, set in London, called A Damsel in Distress. And you see, it brings a lot of things together for me.

Speaker 338:27

Foggy day

Speaker 338:33

In London town.

Speaker 338:40

Had me low and it

Speaker 338:46

Had me down

Speaker 338:50

George and Ira Gershwin's A Foggy Day in London Town, sung by Fred

Presenter38:55

Fred a stare. If you could take only one disc out of the H you've played us, Jack, which would it be?

Presenter39:00

The Rachmaninoff uh number four piano concerto.

Presenter39:04

And one luxury to take to the island with you, any one object of no practical use? Well, it's it's really two objects. If you'll allow me to take lots of student pads, you know, w writing paper. I'll obviously need some um fibre pens, preferably if you don't mind, rather than pencils to go with. But writing materials. Writing materials. So that work can continue as usual. Yes, that's all right. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare.

Speaker 439:19

Right.

Jack Higgins39:19

Probably if you don't.

Jack Higgins39:21

Uh

Speaker 339:21

Yeah.

Speaker 339:25

Zero.

Presenter39:29

In later life, again, thinking about things much more, I've gone back to Eliot, the poet, with a kind of sense of discovery. In fact, on my 50th birthday, my children gave me a little silver plaque engraved with a quotation from Burton Norton: footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose garden. That kind of Eliot use of simple language, which seems to touch one deep inside, I absolutely love. So if I could have it, I'll take the four quartets. The four quartets by T.S. Eliot. And thank you, Jack Higgins, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone.

Jack Higgins40:18

Thank you for listening to Desert Island Discs. For more downloads, please visit the Radio 4 website.